Varnishing Facades, Erasing Memory
Varnishing Facades, Erasing Memory
Reading Urban Beautification with Critical Whiteness Studies
Author(s): Laura RaccanelliSubject(s): Anthropology, Philosophy, Aesthetics, Sociology, Rural and urban sociology, Sociology of Culture
Published by: Spoločnosť pre estetiku na Slovensku a Inštitút estetiky a umeleckej kultúry Filozofickej fakulty Prešovskej univerzity v Prešove
Keywords: Urban Beautification; Aesthetic Capitalism; Territorial Stigmatization; Critical Whiteness Studies; Street Art; Camouflage
Summary/Abstract: The paper addresses the contemporary features of aesthetic capitalism (Böhme, 2001; 2017) in the city, connecting beauty studies with established analyses of ‘territorial stigmatization’ (Wacquant, 2007) in the framework of critical whiteness studies. My argument is that beautification practices in marginal public spaces can be regarded as an attitude of aesthetic neocolonialism. The text investigates the role that art plays in establishing spaces of difference, focusing on the analysis of the idea of beauty exhibited and used in processes of urban transformation. This beautifying operation could mask the intent of domesticating the ‘urban exotic’, representing the aesthetics of the ‘urban other’, overlapping processes of hypervisibilization and invisibilization within the production of normative white visual domains. The resulting transformation is viewed as a new field of value extraction from the urban space while at the same time being a new arena for privilege and inequality production.
Journal: ESPES
- Issue Year: 12/2023
- Issue No: 2
- Page Range: 88-102
- Page Count: 15
- Language: English
